1. Field of the Invention
The invention generally relates to systems and methods for determining when to deploy a vehicle safety system.
2. Description of Related Art
Vehicle safety systems generally include a variety of different safety systems for preventing injury to an occupant of a vehicle. One well known safety system is an airbag safety system. Essentially, the occupant compartment of the vehicle contains one or more airbag systems. These airbag systems are configured to rapidly inflate when the vehicle is involved in a crash. Airbag systems have become more advanced over the years to include multiple airbags located within the occupant compartment of the vehicle. For example, older airbag systems only had a single airbag coupled to a steering wheel of the vehicle, so that when the vehicle is involved in a frontal crash, the forward momentum of the driver would be reduced by the airbag inflating from the steering wheel of the automobile.
More advanced airbag systems would later be developed to include airbags to slow the momentum of occupants other than the driver of the vehicle is involved in a frontal crash. Additionally, more modern airbag systems contain airbags to reduce the momentum of occupants, when the vehicle is impacted from a side or rear.
In order to determine that the vehicle should deploy one or more airbags, the vehicle generally contains a variety of satellite sensors that are located near the exterior of the vehicle. Essentially, when one of these sensors is actuated, a microprocessor connected to the satellite sensors will determine if an impact has occurred and how severe the impact is. If the impact is severe enough, the microprocessor will deploy the airbag. However, in order to avoid any false positives, the microprocessor is usually connected to one or more accelerometers. If the accelerometers also indicate that the vehicle is in a crash and the accelerometer data provided by the accelerometers agrees with the satellite sensor data, the microprocessor can safely determine that the vehicle has indeed been involved in a collision and that the appropriate safety systems should be deployed.
However, information from the accelerometers must be provided to the microprocessor extremely quickly. Accelerometers that have longer group delays are generally not practical for use in determining to deploy a vehicle safety system. In order to overcome this problem, the current solution is to utilize different accelerometers for different vehicle purposes. For example, accelerometers with longer group delays, can be utilized for other vehicle safety systems, such as rollover detection and stability control.